I'm not at all certain he'd be pleased to hear me say it, but I think
Kip Winger is quite possibly one of the hunkiest men ever to become a
rock star. However, in the next breath--and I know this
would please him--I also have
to add that he's an incredible musician, singer, and songwriter, and
it was really the music that first reached out and grabbed me. In
fact, I bought the Winger album In
the Heart of the Young when I was in high school because I had
the riff from "Easy Come, Easy Go" stuck in my head and it just
wouldn't leave!

That album was really my introduction to Kip and his bandmates;
somehow I missed all the big hits from their first, self-titled CD.
But while I really liked their music, at that point, they were
completely under, or, perhaps more accurately,
over my radar visually. This
was just about the time that I finally gave up on MTV, but I do
remember seeing the videos for "Easy Come, Easy Go," "Miles Away," and
"Can't Get Enuff" a few times apiece. However, my reaction to them was
really more to the music than the visuals; particularly with "Can't
Get Enuff," I remember thinking that the song was pretty good, but the
video somewhat off-putting. And, unfortunately, Winger was yet another
casualty of the emerging grunge movement, and I had other bands to
obsess over, so after a while, I kind of forgot about them.

Now fast-forward ten years. My new hubby and I were living in an
apartment complex that piped a satellite TV feed into all of its
apartments, and one day we got a letter saying our channel lineup had
been extended, and one of the new additions was something called "VH-1
Classic Rock." Well, I turned it on--and fell in love. Here were all
of those great videos that I remembered from my teens, plus a lot that
I'd never seen before, even though I knew many of the songs from radio
or CDs I'd bought. (And we made sure to choose a digital cable package
that included VH-1 Classic when we moved into a house of our own!)
Anyway, we were watching over dinner one evening when this video came
on, and I said to myself, "Oh, Winger, I remember them--but I don't
recognize that song title." Then Kip appeared, in all his
leather-trousered, tank-topped, smoldering-eyed glory, and all I could
think was "OMG" ... particularly when it registered what instrument he
was holding. All that, and he played bass,
too?

The video in question was "Seventeen," and a couple of weeks later, we
also saw "Headed For A Heartbreak"--and I was down for the count. I
could scarcely believe that someone so talented could also be so
good-looking, and how in the world had I managed to completely miss
what a hunk Kip was all that time? But I've since come to the
conclusion that I simply wasn't capable of appreciating him as such,
the first time around; I had been rather sheltered as a child and
young teen, and at fourteen and fifteen, my tastes were still
evolving. As astonishing as it might sound, at that point I still
viewed black leather with a certain amount of suspicion, and the raw
sexuality of someone like Kip Winger was, quite frankly, just too
much to handle. It took a few more years before the whole hard
rock/glam metal thing began to have any kind of significant appeal.
(Though I daresay I've more than made up for lost time!)

On a more serious note, however, I do actually enjoy the music just
as much as the scenery. I have all three vintage Winger albums now,
and Kip's two solo albums are on my "to buy" list. Winger did seem to
struggle a bit to find their own sound at first; the debut album is more metal, the subsequent two
more progressive-rock oriented, though the one thing that never
changed was that their music was always more layered and intricate and
technically sophisticated than a lot of other, similar bands. The
debut album is and probably always will be my favorite, however--not
that the other two were bad albums, quite the opposite. But precisely
because they're so good,
ITHOTY and
Pull don't make good
"background music." They demand to be listened
to, kept at the forefront of one's attention. And since I'm usually
doing something else at the same time I'm listening to music--writing,
or working on stuff for this site, or whatever--that does make it a
bit difficult to have Winger on as often as some other bands that I can
listen to with half an ear.

Kip himself is a fascinating person, though, and rather like his
music: full of unexpected depths. It's interesting--he's known all
over the world as "Kip Winger," but his full moniker is actually the
far more impressive "Charles Frederick Kip Winger." (He says that his
mother named him Charles Frederick "in case I ever wanted to get a
real job." )
But that little factoid does sort of typify him as a person--the world
has tended to see just the tip of the iceberg, namely the whole pin-up
thing, and ignore everything else. And I'll admit that I was guilty
enough of that for a while; it used to be that when I looked at
pictures of Kip, the grin was so blindingly brilliant that it was
difficult to see the shadows behind those intensely blue eyes.

But I know better now. At heart, Kip is a man who takes himself and
what he does very seriously indeed, and he has a positively uncanny
penchant for what's almost a kind of clairvoyance. He has said of the
song "Headed For A Heartbreak," from Winger's debut CD, that, "It's
actually very--what's the right word--very something. Cryptic is the
word I want to use, but I don't like the connotation. It's depicting
my life right now. When I wrote the song a year and a half ago, it's
like a predicition into my life right now, which is really kind of
weird. It was just like something I beamed into the future." There is
also a lyric in the song "Blind Revolution Mad," from
Pull: "And the nation's glued
to CNN / To watch their own creation." The song was written in 1992 or
1993, but to me it seems like an eerie foreshadowing of events such as
the Columbine High shootings and the September 11th terrorist attacks.

The most heart-wrenching instance of this, though, has to be the music
video for "Hungry," another song from the debut CD. Kip scripted it
himself, and it's about a man who loses his wife in a car
accident--and Kip lost his own wife, Beatrice, in a car accident in
1996, just before the release of his first solo album. Now, it could
be coincidence, or simple perceptiveness. But Kip describes himself as
a very melancholy person, and I can't help thinking about all the
fantasy novels I've read with a character weighed down to solemnity by
visions of the future...

Favorite Songs & Videos

Favorite Songs:

"Seventeen"

Just a bit of fun...

"Hungry"

I find the video a bit difficult to watch
(kinda touches a raw nerve in a way...) but I do like the song by
itself

"Without The Night"

Great power-ballad

"Time To Surrender"

This just rocks, plain and simple

"Headed For A Heartbreak"

A sort of pointer in the direction that
Winger went on their second album... great track

"Can't Get Enuff"

One of the more lighthearted tracks off
ITHOTY

"Miles Away"

I think this might have been the first
Winger song I ever heard...

"Easy Come, Easy Go"

The riff STILL tends to stick in my head!

"Under One Condition"

Lovely...

"The Rainbow In The Rose"

Am I the only one who gets vague but
compelling visions of some kind of sweeping sword-and-sorcery epic
whenever I listen to this song? (I could be just weird, that way...)

"Blind Revolution Mad"

Raw-edged but very cool

"Down Incognito"

This is probably my favorite track off
Pull

"Spell I'm Under"

Kip wrote this for his wife,
Beatrice... rather bittersweet to listen to now, but still a nice song

Favorite Videos:

"Seventeen"

The video that re-introduced me to Winger
after a long absence, and I still need a cold shower after watching
it...

"Headed For A Heartbreak"

Beautifully filmed... the muted colors and
soft-edged photography make Kip look even yummier than usual...

"Can't Get Enuff"

This was the video that made me realize
how very, very blue Kip's eyes are... sigh...

Favorite Kip Winger Quotes

[on making the video for "Madelaine"] "...I broke out in hives at the
end of it. Nerves. Serious Spinal Tap. My hair was way too poofy."

[on the video for "Seventeen"] "We had to search and destroy to find
the right girl... she did good."

"The only thing that will keep you in the game is good music. That
doesn't mean your music will be hit music. There's a difference
between quality and 'instant fix music,' as I call it. A trendy thing
for the minute, then gone."

"I could be the guy who married the two sides of image and music
together. We could be U2 meets Barry Gibb!"

(Though I feel compelled to point out that Bono is a pretty sexy
fella, and there's far more to Barry Gibb than a white disco suit...)

"I'm one of the more tormented people on the planet; so even if I seem
to be clicking into one of my good moods, it's usually my way of
getting me away from a deep depression."

[on the In The Heart Of The Young
album] "The album is about marrying the spirit of youth with
understanding and intelligence. It might sound cliche, but we believe
music can help in some small way, because it's truly the only language
that speaks to all people."

"A lot of people say I have three different distinct moods, and goofy
is definitely one of them."

"It's hard to write lyrics. You have to write about something you can
sing, and make it believable. I couldn't get up and sing [Guns and
Roses'] 'Sweet Child O' Mine,' and Axl [Rose] probably couldn't get up
and sing 'Without The Night.'"

Perish the thought...
nobody else can do "Without
The Night," and particularly not Axl Rose...

"Though Mr. Winger was functioning on very few hours' sleep, thanks to
an underwater video shoot that ended at 5 AM, he's full of
Kip-isms--meaning that he adopts British accents, uses words like
'stud' and 'kill' and breaks into song at a moment's notice."--Katherine Turman, from an article in
RIP magazine

[on his background in dance] "Ballet is about sex! It's very
animalistic. People don't realize it, but as a dancer you get in touch
with every single muscle in your body--especially, ha ha ha. Well,
you spread your legs a lot!
Your body becomes your whole instrument. It's very sexual, and every
dancer who has ever gotten big in ballet is very sexual. Rock 'n' roll
is sexual. That's the reason I've stayed with ballet. To reach peaks
in ballet is much, much harder than any other kind of dance. I like
that. That's the kind of person I am."

"I love that Backstreet Boys Millennium
album. The first two songs ["Larger Than Life" and "I Want It That
Way"] just crush me. I don't really like pop music, but when I do...
it's that kind of total pop--no excuses pop."

Okay, I feel a lot better about liking the
Backstreet Boys now!

"You kind of forget when you're in a studio, demoing songs, that the
end result is playing in front of twenty thousand people and chicks
throwing their bras."

"A lot of people are really bogged down with the way I look--mostly
the girls. We have a pretty big percentage of males now, too. The
girls are looking, too, but they're also listening. Once I transcend
that--where the girls don't hang me up on their walls just because of
how I look, I'll be happier. I'd rather be hung up on somebody's wall
because they're into music."

Speaking from a personal perspective--how
about some of both? I love music, but I also definitely appreciate a
fine bit of eye-candy...

[on the Pull album] "It
didn't sell much. It was dead in the water. That's why I called it
'Pull,' because when you go shooting, you shout 'Pull!' It was a joke
for the title of that album."

"We've been out there with groups like the Bullet Boys who really know
how to have a good time. We're really boring in comparison. But we all
have our moments, and when you meet some of those young girls
backstage after a show it becomes really tough to be the nice guy you
know you want to be. I guess that's one of the things that 'Seventeen'
is about. Those girls might be young, but they know what they
want--and they know how to get it."

"A lot of people who don't have a lot of talent, their ego fills that
void of non-talent, so their ego is huge. But the more you develop
your talent, the less your ego has to fill up... the king sh*ts of
everybody are always the nicest people."

How profound--and true. I've seen a good example
of this principle just recently, actually, though I shan't name
names...

"I don't know if I have a dark side really, but I'm definitely kind of
melancholy and very, very serious. I handle it by being the court
jester most of the time. But people who know me well can see through
that and know what's really going on. The music is like that, too.
It's technically complex. It's not happy, sad, or angry, just kind of
melancholic at times. I carry the weight of what people are thinking
about this band very much on my shoulders. People are starting to...
well, for the lack of a better word, mob
us. I tend to take that very seriously and think: What am I actually
saying to these people? I can't say, 'Oh, f*ck it, it! It's just a
party. Let's all drink, get f*cked-up and rock 'n' roll!' That's just
not how I am."

"I have no interest in a nice car or a big house. All I want is studio
equipment and to continue working. I see myself as someone like Frank
Zappa, although I'm not the towering genius that he is. But I feel a
kinship to him and people like Peter Gabriel who sit and
work. I'm drowning in my own
ideas. Whether they're good or bad is for the public to decide, but
it's my job to make sure they hear it."

"...I'm a Maltese personality. Either I'll want to be totally alone,
or I'll be doing the butt dance. I'll be the clown or the totally
heavy cerebral weirdo who wants to be locked up with a piano."

Kip Winger's Astrological Sign

Date of Birth: 21 June, 1961

Western Zodiac: Gemini/Cancer (Air/Water)Chinese Zodiac: Ox (Earth)

Despite being on the
cusp between signs in the Western zodiac, I really don't see too much
Cancer in Kip Winger; he's far more a Gemini, with all of that sign's
skill with words. As for the Chinese side, I don't think I've ever seen
a more typical Ox; driven, serious, thoughtful, and tenacious.

The Chord & Sorcery Angle

If Kip Winger were a character in a fantasy novel, he would be:

Hmm... I can see him as a scholar-mage, or something along those
lines--the King's most trusted advisor. Or perhaps a performer, a bard
or actor, who secretly uses his gift of Foresight to keep his troupe
out of trouble...

The fantasy/period outfit I would most like to see Kip Winger model is:

Something befitting a ranking courtier, I
think... silk shirt, velvet doublet... not hose, though; the leather
pants work too well to get rid of.